The TYPO3 CMS team had a very productive Code Sprint to finish pending tasks for the 6.2 LTS release in Cologne. More than 90 patches were merged into the Core during these days and we had some new contributors on board this time.
We had the pleasure to be hosted at <link http: www.denkwerk.com _blank>denkwerk GmbH, which provided us with a nice infrastructure and perfect location: Three meeting rooms, a kitchen with free coffee and soft drinks and perfectly working WLAN. Marcel Wieser from Denkwerk allowed the team to feel at home. Ernesto brought four bottles of Bordeaux wine from Stuttgart, kindly sponsored by @bordeaux_wein (<link http: www.bordeaux.com _blank>bordeaux.com) for our teams pleasure. Andrea Herzog-Kienast sponsored beer, sweets, a very good self baked TYPO3 styled cake and TYPO3 cookies. Perfect fit to match our high coffee demand. Andrea also organized and sponsored a professional masseur who came by on Friday and properly treated the interested developer backs and necks. It was great!
To provide a good start for our days, we have had breakfast at the Sprint Location, kindly sponsored by @SwiftLizard (Chris Zepernick). Spontaneous sponsoring from @merzilla (Ralf Merz) allowed us to buy some sweets and part of the dinner at Djinn's Restaurant on Saturday. Three other meals were sponsored by Denkwerk. Great thanks to all sponsors!
Steffen Ritter organized our Issues-Board on Wednesday already, so we could start productively early on Thursday. Our focus was finishing already pending issues in the main areas of: File Abstraction Layer, Performance and Usability (Backend and Install Tool). There were some related tasks that originated from these main topics, and some bugs that we found and fixed on our way.
We had some new talented contributors joining us for the first time in a Code Sprint, and thus Ernesto set up a separate room to clarify the reviewing system, working with GIT (also on Windows) and providing the guys a helping hand on their first patch sets. Daniel Siepmann, Benjamin Kott, Marcel Wieser and Stephan Großberndt all managed to quickly setup their environment and start digging into some productive work.
Daniel Siepmann took over migrating IRRE sorting from Scriptaculous to jQuery-UI and chatted with Benni Mack about the whole JavaScript unification project. As a result from that a new umbrella Epic task was created to collect all issues regarding this unification: <link http: forge.typo3.org issues _blank>#55575. Daniel will be a helpful asset in improving and cleaning up the backend usability.
Marcel Wieser started implementing a highly demanded small improvement in the new Install Tool: being able to toggle the “All Configuration” accordions. He also worked on plenty of usability related reviews.
Benni Kott has an eye for the visual and will also work closely with the usability team and Felix Kopp on improving the backend styling. He dug into several issues already and exchanged his ideas with the team. He is also working on the new Introduction Package together with Benni Mack, a package which will provide a new modern responsive rendering.
We were happy to have Stephan Großberndt there, a developer using Windows, who was able to reproduce (and fix) some Internet Explorer 8 bugs. He also dug into the Install Tool code and tackled several issues. Last one he was working on will provide an easier upgrade process, by integrating the necessary SQL Schema Update (“Database Compare”) as steps directly in the Upgrade Wizard.
Stefano Kowalke reviewed some very important cleanups and performance improvements, amongst others the notorious the “(int) instead of intval()” patch (<link http: forge.typo3.org issues _blank>#54265) which was finally merged.
Frans Saris came with an amazing new usability improvements in the File handling in the backend: Drag&Drop in the Filelist now looks very cool, and there is also support for multiple file upload in the Element Browser, amongst other gems. Thanks a lof for the great work, Frans!
Andreas Wolf worked on and brainstormed about many performance issues.
Ingo Schmitt joined with two missions: to talk to the people involved in the workpackages projects in order get an overview of the status. In addition he also helped in reviewing plenty of issues during these days.
Felix Oertel continued working on getting Extbase faster. His current baby is getting the currently very slow Extbase query generation process faster by caching the once generated queries intelligently. This will be a drop-in enhancement without breaking any current functionality: just much faster!
Stefan Frömken was our “busy bee” and our reviewing champion. He managed to review almost 20 different patches and helped others getting things done.
Olly Hader continued the tedious work in brainstorming about the DataHandler and workspaces issues. Peter Kühn and Benni were his sparring partners, helping getting an idea of the task ahead of them all and documenting it.
On Saturday we had a special visit of Rupi Germann, which we haven’t seen since long. He came to discuss his findings on the performance of latest TYPO3 releases and share his ideas and concerns. This provided us with helpful discussion matter and allowed him to get a better understanding on how and why things have evolved since 4.5. Helmut Hummel and Benni Mack already started to tackle some of the reported issues.
We used our IRC channel #typo3-cms on Freenode to communicate interactively with the outside world and have had the help of other contributors in reviewing and working together with us off-site. Thanks Anja, Markus Klein, Stefan Neufeind, Christian Kuhn, Felix Kopp, Marcin S?gol, Wouter Wolters, Philipp Gampe and others!
All in all it was a great event, a perfect location and host, and very motivated developers. We again welcome the new contributors and hope they could find themselves part of our effort and see them further in future.
Next up: The beta5 with all the new stuff included will be released next week. The next Code Sprint will be in Venlo / Netherlands, from 10th to 12th of March.
Keep up the great work!
